Who is Sir Jeffrey Donaldson? DUP leader steps down after criminal charges

Published

2 years ago

March 30, 2024

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Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has been an ever-present feature of the political landscape in Northern Ireland for several decades.

But his leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party came to an end on 29 March, when it revealed Donaldson had resigned as chief after he was charged with sexual offences of a “historical nature”.

Born in County Down in the 1960s, he was raised during the Troubles and has been a vocal campaigner for unionism throughout his life.

Donaldson came to the fore after the UK left the EU for his opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol – which he believed undermined Northern Ireland‘s place in the United Kingdom.

Growing up and family deaths

Donaldson was born in 1962 and raised in Kilkeen in County Down alongside four brothers and three sisters in what he described as “a traditional, rural, home-centred upbringing”.

As a boy, his “childhood innocence was shattered” by the Troubles – in 1970 his cousin Samuel Donaldson, a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was killed in an IRA car bombing.

As a young man, he joined the Orange Order, a protestant group in which he later became an Assistant Grand Master.

He was at one point chairman of the Ulster Young Unionist Council, and also joined the Ulster Defence Regiment – a part of the British Army which mainly consisted of volunteers, who largely spent their time guarding key points, patrolling, carrying out surveillance, and manning vehicle checkpoints.

In 1985 Samuel’s brother, Alex, was also killed by the IRA, in a mortar attack on a police station.

Run up to the Good Friday Agreement and defection

In the early 1980s, Donaldson worked on Enoch Powell’s campaigns to be elected as an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP for South Down.

Donaldson was later elected as a UUP member of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1985 at the age of 22.

He was elected to the House of Commons in 1997 and was a member of the UUP’s negotiating team for what became the Good Friday Agreement.

However, he voted against the deal in the subsequent referendum and warned UUP leader David Trimble against supporting it.

In 1998, he was blocked from standing in the elections for the Stormont assembly.

Having continued to agitate under Lord Trimble’s leadership, Donaldson left the UUP in 2003 and joined the DUP, having been re-elected to Stormont.

Brexit, Northern Ireland Protocol and the party leadership

Donaldson has served consistently as the DUP MP for Lagan Valley, but stood down from the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2010, having served in government in Belfast.

He was notable for his opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion – which Westminster legalised in Northern Ireland.

In 2016 he was knighted in the birthday honours list for political service.

In the same year, he supported Brexit, and became associated with the Theresa May administration in 2017 as part of the confidence and supply arrangement which saw the DUP support Mrs May’s government in key votes.

However, the party opposed the deal Mrs May put to parliament in 2019.

Since the implementation of Brexit, Donaldson has opposed the Northern Ireland Protocol, which he says undermines the Good Friday Agreement he voted against.

In 2019 he became the leader of the DUP at Westminster, and was elected leader of the party as a whole in 2021.

He successfully stood in the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, but has said he will not take up the seat until the situation with the Northern Ireland Protocol can be resolved.

Last year, Donaldson refused to endorse the Windsor Framework, which was intended to resolve issues with the Protocol – and is still sitting as an MP at Westminster.

Power-sharing returned in Northern Ireland in early 2024, after Donaldson and the DUP agreed on a way forward with the UK government on post-Brexit trade.

His resignation was confirmed on Good Friday 2024, and it was announced that his deputy, Gavin Robinson MP, would be made interim leader.

It is understood Donaldson will be “strenuously contesting” all charges against him.

Politics

Crypto urges SEC to see the good in blockchain privacy tools

Published

6 hours ago

December 16, 2025

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Crypto urges SEC to see the good in blockchain privacy tools

Crypto industry executives have urged the US Securities and Exchange Commission to shift its thinking on blockchain privacy tools, pitching that there are legitimate applications for them outside of criminal use.

The SEC hosted crypto and finance executives for a discussion and panel on financial surveillance and privacy on Monday, the agency’s sixth crypto-focused roundtable this year, as it seeks to overhaul its approach to crypto.

StarkWare general counsel Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos, who participated in a panel discussion, told Cointelegraph after the event that a major takeaway was that there shouldn’t be an assumption that those using and creating privacy tools are “overwhelmed by wrongdoers.”

“Why is the assumption that an individual needs to affirmatively prove that they are compliant or they’re using the tool for good?”

“As opposed to it being the other way around, where the assumption is that this individual is using the tool for good until there is some sort of indication that they’re using it for bad,” she said.

Kirkpatrick Bos added that “of course, wrongdoers were using, or are using those tools, but there needs to be a balance.”

*Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos (left) discussing financial privacy at an SEC roundtable on Monday. Source:* *Paul Brigner*

During the roundtable, Wayne Chang, the founder and CEO of the credential management company SpruceID, said some percentage of users of stablecoins, a crypto tool that is slowly becoming mainstream, will want privacy.

“There are a ton of stablecoins that aren’t onchain yet that would come onchain if there is privacy,” he said. “We’re going to see an increase in demand for privacy-preserving blockchains.”

“My hope is that regulators continue to engage industry, and we can have those discussions on how to keep privacy for folks while also having tools that are useful,” Chang said.

Customer checks are becoming outdated

Kirkpatrick Bos said a discussion on Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) measures focused on whether current rules are sufficient in the age of artificial intelligence.

“The question arose and was debated on the panel, well, what is necessary for Anti-Money Laundering?” she said. “Now we have AI. It’s made manual, AML and KYC antiquated. How do we solve for that?”

“There was a sense that the current system of AML and KYC is antiquated, it’s problematic, it’s ineffective,” she added. “But there needs to be some sort of check when it’s a centralized entity facilitating flows of money to ensure that they’re not helping wrongdoers.”

Many financial institutions request a picture of a user’s driver’s license for its KYC checks, which Kirkpatrick Bos said was “absurd, because an individual can go on the internet and develop a fake driver’s license in a matter of seconds.”

“So the question is, can cryptography-based tools improve that and make it harder for bad guys to do that? But can they also do that and make it harder for bad guys while preserving an individual’s privacy and not revealing data like an address, where it is not necessary to vet the legality of the funds?” she added.

Some projects have begun to test crypto-based solutions for proving identity while claiming to preserve privacy, such as Sam Altman’s World, which gives users a cryptographic key they can use to prove they’re human.

SEC’s Atkins warns of potential for crypto mass surveillance

SEC chair Paul Atkins had given opening remarks at the roundtable, warning that if “pushed in the wrong direction, crypto could become the most powerful financial surveillance architecture ever invented.”